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David Stockman, a former budget director under President Ronald Reagan, derided the budget plan of Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick in an op-ed in The New York Times Tuesday.
“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to 'job creators'(read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” Stockman wrote in the op-ed, later adding:“Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices.”
Stockman, who resigned in 1985 in protest over deficit spending, has added his voice to a chorus of economists criticizing Ryan’s "Path to Prosperity," which would give tax cuts to the wealthy while slashing funding for programs like Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps, all in the name of reducing the national debt.
Given Ryan’s interest in cutting the social safety net, it’s no surprise that Nobel-Prize winning and left-leaning economist Paul Krugman called Ryan’s budget proposal “just a fantasy” in a blog post Monday. But the fact that Stockman -- a budget director under conservative messiah Reagan and former managing director at now-defunct Wall Street firm Solomon Brothers -- is slamming Ryan’s budget lends weight to the overall criticism.
Stockman didn't stop at deriding Ryan's budget, though; he also criticized other financial policies of the Romney-Ryan ticket. Stockman writes in the Times op-ed:
Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking.
The op-ed may be part of a broader change of heart for Stockman, who once made a killing in corporate buyouts after retiring from public service, according to the Associated Press. More recently, he’s pushed for raising taxes and claims he's so scared there will be another financial crisis that he doesn’t own a single stock.
New York Times Tuesday
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